Fortinet Discovers MongoDB 'Regular Expression' Parsing Multiple Remote Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered multiple remote denial of service vulnerabilities in MongoDB.
MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented database for multiple platforms, which provides high performance, high availability and automatic scaling. Compared with the traditional table-based relational database structure, MongoDB takes advantage of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster.
These discovered vulnerabilities are caused due to incorrectly handling specially crafted regular expressions. They could be exploited by attackers to launch denial of service attack.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

MongoDB.PCRE.Heap.Overflow.Remote.DoS
Released Apr 15, 2015
Users should apply the solution provided by MongoDB.

Additional Information

The vulnerabilities actually exist in the 3rd-party PCRE library incorporated into MongoDB. The PCRE library 8.37 has fixed them.
When MongoDB runs with the authentication option '--auth', an attacker needs to be successfully authenticated into MongoDB first.

Acknowledgement

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Kai Lu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.